


The Ghost Writers

by TheChainLink



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ghosts, Supernatural Elements, Tales from the Crypt style, Who Lives?, Who dies?, Who tells their story?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27301369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheChainLink/pseuds/TheChainLink
Summary: His name was Trevor Bowman. And now his story will be told.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 1





	The Ghost Writers

Trevor had never imagined that an old Remington Band typewriter would change his life.

He had bought the old thing for cheap at a jumble sale, thinking he could sell it for a decent price. He had set it down on his desk next to his computer, thinking he would find a place for it later. For the first time, he had realised how pitiful the machine really looked; it barely filled the extra space. Gazing into the blank page, he was reminded of the similar empty void of the Word document that awaited him on the computer screen. 

Though Trevor couldn’t remember where, he had once heard that writers were simply paid to lie. Unfortunately, he seemed incapable of lying when it came to putting them on the page. 

Resigned to his failure, he rested his head on the desk and let out a long, tired sigh.

Then he heard a clack.

Trevor jerked upright. There at the top of the page was a single typeface letter: “M”. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples; he had probably just hit one of the keys by accident, or maybe the machine was misfiring or something.

But then there came another clack. And another. Trevor watched on in disbelief as the typing grew steadily faster, building up a rhythm until it had typed out two full sentences:

My name is Sarah Burton. Will you tell my story?

The name jostled something in the back of his mind. The carriage return lever slid over to the next line with a short sharp ding, and the machine fell silent. Ten, then twenty seconds passed with no further activity, and Trevor realised it might actually be waiting for a response. Feeling like a fool, he typed “Yes”.

The words vanished from the page. Suddenly the page erupted in black letters, typing at an unbelievably fast rate. In less than a minute it had reached the end of the page, paused mid-sentence. Experimentally, Trevor eased the page out, set it aside, took a fresh page from his printer and placed it in the machine. The cycle continued, with the pages being filled and Trevor replacing them, until the machine finally went silent, leaving him with five full pages of hard black writing. Wondering vaguely if he was dreaming, he laid them out on his desk and started to read.

The “story”, as this Sarah Burton person had called it, was written in the first person, as though it was Sarah herself telling it. It began normally enough, telling of her childhood with a deceased father and an abusive stepmother – “straight out of a fairy tale”, as she described it – before suddenly taking a dark turn.

One afternoon, when her stepmother had been especially unbearable, she had stayed in her attic bedroom and refused to come out, eventually crying herself to sleep. But when she woke up the next day, the trapdoor had been locked from the outside. No amount of pleading, begging or even crying could persuade her stepmother to let her out, and after three agonising days she had died of dehydration.

But the story didn’t end there. The perspective suddenly changed; it was still Sarah telling the story, and yet it wasn’t. This Sarah was aware of her own dead body quietly decomposing on the attic floor.

She was also aware of her stepmother finally unlocking the trapdoor a few days later.

The story went on. If what she said was to be believed, Sarah’s spirit had watched on as her stepmother had taken her body into the back garden and buried her in a shallow pit. The woman had taken the truth to her grave.

The final line read, “My name is Sarah Burton, and now my story will be told.”

Sarah Burton. The name continued to wheedle away at the back of his mind, threatening to drive him mad. He decided to do some research to put his mind at rest.

What he found was… enlightening, to say the least.

The monitor was filled with results from true crime and cold case websites, all of them dating back several years. As was to be expected, the details varied wildly between accounts, but one uniting detail was that Sarah Burton had never been found; she was nothing more than a cold case, another abandoned mystery left unsolved.

Everything fell into place – this story, this confession was the girl’s legacy, a way of ensuring from beyond the grave that the world would know her fate. And now Sarah Burton – or some remnant of her, at least – wanted him to share it with others, to show people the truth about what had happened to her.

To tell her story.

Trevor felt a chill travel up his spine and spread across his entire body. As if on cue the machine began to type once more, and Trevor hastily inserted another page to receive its message:

My name is Luke Winters, it read. Will you tell my story?

Trevor suddenly felt he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. His eyes were suddenly glued to the page, re-reading those two sentences for what felt like an eternity.

Might as well get it over with, he thought, typing his reply.

But the stories did not end there; after Luke came Stewart Gordon, followed by Michael Fitzgerald, until the tales of seven unfortunate children lay before him on the desk and the typewriter went silent at last.

Desperate for something to take his mind off it, he looked over Sarah’s story again; it was good, better than good.

In fact, he realised, it might even sell.

Grateful for the distraction, Trevor spent the rest of the day re-writing Sarah’s story on his computer, as though he were making the second draft of one of his own tales. He typed up this new draft on his computer, giving it a title, changing Sarah Burton to Angela Selick, and changing some details to cover his tracks. By that afternoon he had sent it off to a pulp horror magazine named Twisted Minds, an old favourite of his. Whenever he sent something to them, he was practically writing himself a cheque.

Three days later there came the reply: Sarah’s (or rather, Angela’s) story in the latest issue of Twisted Minds, along with a cheque for two hundred dollars and a glowing review from the editor. Trevor could hardly believe his luck. 

Next was Luke Winters, changed to Donald King and sent off to another magazine, Shock and Schlock. This one ended up on the very first page. 

Over the course of a week he had rewritten the remaining stories in turn, changing names and swapping out details, sending them one-by-one to different horror magazines and reaping the profits.

But now the typewriter remained silent. Day after day he waited for another story, for anything, and day after day he was disappointed. The night before sending off the final story he had actually found himself talking to the damn thing before giving up in disgust.

Now, the typewriter had been silent for almost a month. Trevor paced back and forth across his study, pausing occasionally to wipe at the ever-present sweat on his brow. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the familiar clacking start again.

Hello Trevor, the message read.

Something was wrong; he could feel it. Who is this? He typed in response.

No sooner had he taken his hands off the keys than the machine slid over to a new line.

You know who we are. Sarah Burton. Luke Winters. Stewart Gordon. Michael Fitzgerald. Violet Tucker. James Crichton. Stephen Bachman. We told you our stories.

His eyes widened; the names flickered in and out between their real names and his aliases, as though their identities were fighting for control. But it was the next few sentences that made his blood run cold.

You said you would tell them. You said you would tell people the truth.

You lied.

Trevor’s hands flew across the keys: 

I had to make some changes. Otherwise your stories would never sell. 

Then, as an afterthought, he added: And people would never see them.

The keys started pounding with such intensity that Trevor thought they would come loose. 

You told our stories because you thought they would sell?

Trevor heard himself curse.

Another message: So you admit it!

Seemingly the whole room began to shake; the typewriter itself, then the desk, even the floorboards beneath his feet. The light above his head started to flicker before bursting in a wild shower of sparks. He heard the office door slam shut behind him, followed by the lock sliding into place with a fatal click. All the while the typewriter churned out line after line of gibberish as its keys smashed themselves in one by one, until the machine exploded in a flash of blue light and a rush of wind that blasted him back against the wall.

Coming to his senses, he looked up to see a row of shadowy figures standing before him. He immediately knew what he was looking at – these were the dead children, or at least the forms they had chosen to take: there was the poltergeist that had driven James Crichton to suicide. Next to it stood a hunched-over old crone who could only be Sarah Burton’s stepmother. Seven twisted figures, the tormentors who had claimed those innocent lives, closing in on him with a single-minded hatred.

Trevor curled himself into a foetal position against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut and bracing himself for the inevitable.

When he finally worked up the courage to steal a glance, there was nothing but darkness. Daring to open his eyes fully, he saw that he was now in a pitch-black room no larger than ten square feet, with his would-be murderers nowhere to be seen. Without so much as a door, the room was utterly featureless.

Except, that is, for a familiar wooden desk directly opposite him, occupied only by an equally-familiar typewriter.

Trevor got to his feet, walked over to the desk, and raised his hands to the keys. With a grim smile, he realised that the right words were simply coming to him, just like they used to.

My name is Trevor Bowman, he wrote. Will you tell my story?

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to SpiritsShackled for proofreading! How the turns have tabled.


End file.
